Below:

Next story in Science

Still think cellphones are bad for your health? In the poorest
regions of the world they have the potential of saving millions
of lives, a fact that far outweighs the miniscule, if any, risk
of developing brain cancer.

In Honduras, for example, researchers at the University of
Michigan Medical School are using cellphones
to help diabetes patients maintain their diet, exercise and
medication regime. As reported in the upcoming June issue of the
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the doctors saw
immediate and significant improvements in blood-sugar levels
resulting from weekly phone calls concerning their diabetes
program.

These are patients in rural areas who otherwise would have a
difficult time visiting a health clinic. Yet despite their
poverty, the majority of the population in this region owns or
has access to a cellphone.

In fact, there are over 4 billion cellphone subscriptions,
representing more than 60 percent of the global population,
according to the United Nations. As such, health experts
increasingly are turning to these handheld gadgets to reach
long-neglected impoverished populations.

Cellphones particularly are useful in contacting people living in
regions with poor infrastructure, where roads, traditional
telephone lines, Internet and television are all but nonexistent.

Doctor's calling

The Honduras study, for all its merit, is not entirely novel. The
field of cellphone health intervention has exploded in recent
years, with not even a thought given to any potential harm from
cellphone radiation.

Interventions can be categorized broadly as health education,
data collection and monitoring, or adherence, as was the case of
the Honduras diabetes program.

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, for example, health-care workers
now can use cellphones to reach mothers to check on their health
status, and that of their children. Among the more recent
studies, as reported in the January 2011 issue of the journal
Trials, researchers were able to effectively monitor HIV-positive
mothers in South Africa with cellphones to help prevent the
transmission of the virus to their children.

In Kenya, HIV and AIDS patients who received routine text
messages about medications had significantly improved adherence
to their drugs and consequently had better rates of viral
suppression compared with the study control group. This was
reported in November 2010 in the journal The Lancet.

Elsewhere in Africa and Asia, health researchers are using text
messaging and phone calls to educate the public on safe
sex and health and nutrition in general.

Calling home

What's good for the developing world is also good for America.
Duke University has begun a two-year clinical trial called Cell
Phone Intervention in Young Adults, or CITY. The study will use
cellphones almost exclusively to deliver weight-loss
information to a racially diverse group of young men and
women.

The fact that young adults are constantly using cellphones has
not escaped health experts. Doctors targeted sexually active
young men in Philadelphia with cellphone calls and messages about
safe sex and HIV-prevention; and this led to increased monogamy
by study's end, as reported in the April 2011 issue of the
Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare.

The name of that journal — Telemedicine and Telecare — should
tell you how the health community views cell phones. There's no
Journal of Cellphone Cancer. Four billion cellphone
subscriptions, and no blip in the brain cancer rate. Monitoring
cancer patients with cellphones will be an inevitable irony.